ENTER2013 Conference: eTourism Opportunities and Challenges for the next 20 years

Innovation and latest trends in information and communication technology will form one of the main themes at ENTER 2013 providing conference delegates with an useful insight into a number of focussed issues such as social commerce, augmented reality and best practice in tablet and devise usage.

Finding out about innovation and latest trends might be one of the key reasons why ENTER 2013 attracts so many people to join the great conference where academics and the industry come together and share their knowledge with the conference delegates. ENTER 2013 will be full of presentations that introduce new innovations and the latest trends in information and communication technology in travel and tourism illustrated with outstanding examples of best practise.

The 23rd January 2013 will start with an interesting session that explicitly focuses on ‘Innovation in Social Commerce – latest trends in Travel Booking’. This session will be moderated by Nicholas Hall and consists of a number of presentations about topics like ‘Dynamic social media usage for results’ presented by Julianne Sass from the FTI Touristic Group.

The second conference day will be opened with a keynote speech about ‘Cutting edge IT innovations in tourism’ outlined by Oliviero Stock from the Center for Information Technology. More presentations in the afternoon will focus on the issue of ‘Augmented reality in tourism’, which will be moderated by Zornitza Yovcheva and Dimitrios Buhalis from Bournemouth University.

The theme around ‘Innovation and latest trends’ will probably reach its height on Friday, the 25thJanuary 2013. At this day the innovation and industry focus will start in the morning with a session about ‘The image and video revolution of the Web’, that will be moderated by Alessandro Inversini. This session will consist of presentations that will cover the topics ‘Viral videos for hotel business and destination promotion’ introduced by Janez Jager, who works at Life Class Hotels & Resorts and ‘The power of image and Video and story telling’ presented by Damian Cook from E-Tourism Frontiers. A second session focussing on ‘Tablet and device innovation clinic –best practice’ will include presentations about more innovative topics and trends like ‘Cultural Tourism Ways through mobile Applications and Services’ and ‘Web based platform for DMOs – Managing Multi-platform Mobile Guides’.

Finally the theme on innovation and latest trends will be rounded off with a 20th anniversary panel and final conclusions of the ENTER 2013 Conference, where the main findings of the conference will be summarized under the topic ‘Back to and from the future: 20 years of innovation in in tourism’.

The examples stated above provide only a small insight into the great variety of those presentations at ENTER 2013 Conference that are focussed on innovation and latest trends of information and communication technology in travel and tourism. An overview about all the presentations can be obtained from the draft program, which is available on the website of ENTER 2013 (http://www.enter-2013.org/).

By using the theme of innovation and latest trends ENTER 2013 follows its aim to actively exchange, share, and challenge state-of-the-art research and industrial case studies on the application of information and communication technologies to travel and tourism. It will provide a great opportunity to people from the industry to react upon these trends at early stages and benefit from positive results.

The ENTER 2013 Conference will take place between the 22nd and 25th of January, 2013 in the Congress Convention Centre in Innsbruck, Austria. People intending to attend the conference may register on the website (http://www.enter-2013.org/Registration-64.htm)